The saga commenced when our flight to Spain was delayed for more than an hour on Iberia. Their “on time” claims really meant nothing. Hannah and I came up with a nickname for the airline, “Iberia, more like Lieberia!” The jokes we made the rest of the week were about as clever, but not more so. The best part about the flight was the attendant who kept speaking to us in Spanish after giving her a number of lost looks. She yelled at Hannah for texting one of her friends an hour before the flight took off. We were on her naughty list. And as always, the flight was restless. It was easy to forget the meaning of sleep after each coffee cup we sipped.
When we arrived in Spain, we had to take a bus to our plane and drag our suitcases up the stairs to the door. I tried to speak French to Hannah on the bus, but we ended up losing our composure and giving our American identities away. I was finally amoung Moroccans. Yes, many of the women did wear veils and the passenger population was diverse in appearance just as I expected. There are even red-haired and blue-eyed Moroccans. They were amused by our switching between French, English and a little bit of Arabic throughout the flight. We were trying on our new Moroccan personas when we clearly didn’t look the part.
The customs man asked me if I could speak Arabic. “That’s an Arabic name,” he said in French. “No I am Pakistani,” I responded. He seemed pleased by this fact and the fact that I am Muslim. The first security guard I showed my passport to guessed my ethnicity right away and I’m still not sure how. And when we found our luggage, two benevolent men helped us haul it on to a cart. “Wow, you have a lot of luggage,” they said to us in French. I told them that we were going to be in Morocco for four months and they responded with, “Bienvenue!” welcoming us with smiles and nods. We left customs and walked the cat walk towards the door. The cafés we passed were closed, but Moroccans still filled the seats and sat there watching us.
Finally, Rachid from Amideast found us. We thought we would have to use the confusing pay phone since we arrived two and a half hours late. And another girl, Afshan, from the program met us there. The drive to Casablanca lasted about and hour and fifteen minutes. There wasn’t much to see for about an hour. It was mostly trees, signs in French and Arabic, and cleanly paved road.
When we got to our hotel room, we spent a few minutes trying to figure out where the toilet flushed and cracking jokes about the bidet. Was there even AC in this place? And wow, were towels really 100 dirhams each? Memories of Pakistan were filling me with strange questions. The toilet did flush, we didn’t have to purchase towels for 100 dirhams because they were actually hiding in the back of the shower, but the AC leaked, providing us with cool puddles of water to step in each time we returned to our temporary home.
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